Bullet ridden porta-potties. Burned cars. Piles of shoes and personal belongings left behind in the chaos.
These heart-wrenching artifacts of the massacre that occurred on October 7 at the Nova Music Festival are now on display in New York, at an exhibit meant to shake the global community out of its silence, and the man behind it is none other than media mogul Scooter Braun.
The entertainment bigwig, who has managed some of the biggest names in the music industry including Justin Bieber and J Balvin, was driven to do his part by reflecting on his own past encounter with Islamist terrorism.
In 2017, a suicide bomber attacked the Manchester Arena where Ariana Grande had just wrapped up her performance. 22 people were killed and over one thousand injured in the stadium that was filled with young fans. Just two weeks later, the pop star and her manager Braun organized a massive concert benefit to support the victims. Called “One Love Manchester,” it featured major artists like Coldplay and Miley Cyrus, and received an outpouring of support from around the world.
But in the aftermath of October 7, when Hamas terrorists sharing the same ideology attacked the Nova festival and Israeli communities on the Gaza border, those same artists remained silent. Some in the international community and entertainment industry have even called the attacks justified, or tried to reason that they didn’t occur in a vacuum.
Braun himself says he was “shocked” by the way the world reacted to the Nova massacre.
“When Manchester happened they rallied, when Las Vegas happened they rallied. This is the largest massacre in music history in a live event and nobody was talking about it.
“They were making it a political issue, and I don’t think an attack on music festivals and innocent music lovers is about politics or borders.”
Over 3,000 people had gathered in the forest area just outside Kibbutz Re’im for the trance music festival that weekend. Just before 7 A.M. hundreds of Hamas terrorists attacked the festival, turning it into a hunting ground. Braun visited Israel in December, and met with many of the victims who were still rehabilitating in the hospital.
“When I saw they were just kids who loved music, when they took me to the exhibit, I knew the world needed to see this, so that they could see themselves that this could’ve been Coachella, this could’ve been Lollapalooza, this could’ve been Stagecoach. I think by seeing yourself in this, you start to realize that this is about humanity.”
The Nova Exhibit was originally created in Tel Aviv as an homage to the more than 360 music-lovers who were murdered, the thousands injured, and the dozens kidnapped. Many victims were raped, and those who survived are still dealing with the trauma.
After hearing from the survivors and seeing the exhibit, Braun felt a responsibility to use his voice.
“I think it’s not necessarily that people are scared to support Israel, I think that it’s that they’re more scared to be supportive of anything that feels divisive, and I think for people it is easier to stay silent and not have thousands of people yelling at you and telling you that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The amount of misinformation, the amount of hatred, the amount of noise to distract people from what took place was so incredibly overwhelming. That is why I am standing here at this exhibit in New York City and hoping to bring it to other places like LA so other people can see it.”
Currently open for the month of May, the exhibit in New York costs just two dollars to enter, with the proceeds going towards funds to commemorate the victims, rehabilitate survivors of the festival, and support the ‘Tribe of Nova’ community.
It comes as little surprise that Braun has faced pushback for his outspokenness, and the exhibit itself has faced protests. To them, Braun says he has two answers.
“Don’t talk to me about your want for peace or your want for anyone to have freedom unless you also acknowledge all people. And two, you can make all the noise you want, but it’s not gonna stop us from telling the story.”
Braun says that it’s the victims themselves who empowered him to speak up.
“I think coming to Israel gave me a tremendous amount of strength. I felt like the people I met, every single one of them talked about peace, and I met people who were shot through the leg, almost died and lost friends and instead of talking about hatred, they talked about wanting peace on the other side. You know this is controversial for some, but I don’t care. You should have room in your heart to have compassion for all innocent people.”
Read testimonials from survivors of the Nova Music Festival massacre:
• ‘I felt like I was in a gas chamber… everyone was dying on me,” says Nova festival survivor >>
• ‘It’s hard not to feel guilty surviving this’: Millet Ben Haim shares story from Nova festival >>
• Heroic police commander relives the hardest day of his life >>